David Luis-Brown, Chair

Associate Professor of Cultural Studies and English

Contact Information

Spring 2015 Office Hours

Tuesdays, 1:15 - 3:30 pm

Education

Ph.D., Literature, University of California at Santa Cruz
M.A., Literature, University of California at Santa Cruz
M.A., Comparative Culture, University of California at Irvine
B.A., English, Magna Cum Laude, Amherst College

David Luis-Brown is Associate Professor in the departments of Cultural Studies and English at Claremont Graduate University. He is the author of Waves of Decolonization: Discourses of Race and Hemispheric Citizenship in Cuba, Mexico and the United States (Duke University Press, 2008). His most recent article is “Slave Rebellion and the Conundrum of Cosmopolitanism: Plácido and La Escalera in a Neglected Cuban Antislavery Novel by Orihuela,” Atlantic Studies 9.2 (2012): 209-230. He is also the author of “An 1848 for the Americas: the Black Atlantic, ‘El negro mártir,’ and Cuban Exile Anticolonialism,” American Literary History 21.3 (2009): 431-467. His essay, “Transnationalisms against the State: Contesting Neocolonialism in the New Negro Movement, Cuban Negrismo and Mexican Indigenismo,” is forthcoming in the collection Escape from New York! The “Harlem Renaissance” Reconsidered, edited by Davarian Baldwin and Minkah Makalani, and soon to be published by the University of Minnesota Press. Luis-Brown is currently working on two books: a critical edition and translation of Andrés Avelino de Orihuela’s Cuban antislavery novel El Sol de Jesús del Monte (1854) and Blazing at Midnight: Slave Rebellion and Social Identity in Cuban and U.S. Culture. One of the chief aims of Blazing at Midnight is to assess techniques of social categorization in predisciplinary social science, travel narratives, novels, periodicals, and visual culture. Using a transnational, hemispheric Americas approach, Professor Luis-Brown teaches interdisciplinary and interethnic courses on issues of race and imperialism in U.S. and Latin American literature and culture. Luis-Brown earned his B.A. in English at Amherst College and his Ph.D. in Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has been the recipient of a President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship from the University of California, Berkeley, a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend, an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Research Fellowship, and a Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellowship at the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University.

Teaching Fields

Hemispheric Americas Studies

Latino/a Studies

Black Diaspora Studies

Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century U.S. American Literature and Culture

Current Project(s)

Blazing at Midnight: Slave Rebellion and Social Identity in Cuban and U.S. Culture

Blazing at Midnight is a comparative literary-historical analysis of the uses of slave rebellion in constructing social identity at moments of national crisis.

The Sun of Jesús del Monte: A Cuban Abolitionist Novel by Andrés Avelino de Orihuela

Includes a translation and critical introduction, both by the editor of the volume. Under contract with Arte Público Press.

Selected Publications

Waves of Decolonization: Discourses of Race and Hemispheric Citizenship in Cuba, Mexico and the United States, New Americanists series, Duke University Press, 2008. Reviewed in American Literature,American Literary History, American Quarterly, Criticism, History: Reviews of New Books, the Hispanic American Historical Review, the Journal of American History, and Wadabagei: A Journal of the Caribbean and its Diasporas.

Additional Information

Awards and Fellowships

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Research Fellowship, the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, summer, 2004.

National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute Fellow, “The Americas of José Martí,” University of South Florida (Tampa) and the Centro de Estudios Martianos (Havana, Cuba), June 2-July 5, 2002.

University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Comparative Literature, University of California at Berkeley, 1999-2001.

National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend, July 1-September 1, 2001.